Employer wellness programs don’t cut healthcare costs, study suggests

Becker's Healthcare March 20, 2019
Morgan Haefner

While the workplace wellness industry generates $8 billion in annual revenue, a recent study found little evidence that the programs lower healthcare costs or change employee behavior within a year, according to Scientific American.

Researchers with the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign ran a large-scale randomized controlled trial to test how wellness programs affected employee health, well-being, productivity and healthcare spending.

The researchers created a workplace wellness program dubbed iThrive at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. They randomly assigned some employees to a control group and enrolled others in iThrive, according to Scientific American.

Of the employees enrolled in iThrive, 56 percent completed...

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